Computing systems have made significant contributions toward the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous devices, such as desktop personal computers (PCs), laptop PCs, tablet PCs, netbooks, e-readers, smart phones, servers, and the like have facilitated increased productivity and reduced costs in communicating and analyzing data in most areas of entertainment, education, business, and science. One common aspect of a number of computing systems is the touch-screen input/output interface. The touch-screen input/output interface includes a display and a touch sensor overlaid on the display. The display may typically be a cathode ray tube (CRT), liquid crystal display (LCD), plasma, light emitting diode (LE)), or the like type display. The display is utilized to display items such as alphanumeric characters, icons, cursor, pictures, graphics, drawings and/or the like to a user. The touch sensor may typically be a resistive, capacitive, or surface acoustic wave type touch sensor. The touch sensor is utilized to detect a localized activation (e.g., touch) by a user on the touch-screen input/output interface. In a number of cases the localized activation detected by the touch sensor corresponds to one or more items on the display. For example, the display may output a graphical user interface, including a plurality of selectable buttons, for an application. Touching a given button on the display by a user may be input to the application as a corresponding user input. The touch-screen input/output device therefore enables the user to interact directly with what is displayed, rather than indirectly through another input/output device such as a point device or navigation key.
Referring to FIG. 1, an exemplary computing device according to the conventional art is shown. The computing device 100 includes one or more processors 105 communicatively coupled to one or more memories 110, and one or more peripheral devices including a touch-screen input/output device 115-130. It is appreciated that the computing device 100 typically includes numerous other devices, components, peripherals, communication busses, and sub-systems, such as chip sets (e.g., northbride and southbride), volatile and non-volatile memories, network interfaces, and the like. The devices are not shown and discussed because they are well known in the art and not germane to an understanding of embodiments of the present technology.
The touch-screen input/output device 115-130 includes a display 115 and a touch sensor 120 overlaid on the display 115. The display 115 is communicatively coupled to one or more processors 105 through its corresponding display control module 125. The touch sensor 120 is communicatively coupled to one or more processors 105 through its corresponding touch sensor control module 130. It is appreciated that the display 115, display control module 125, touch sensor 120 and touch control module 130 may be implemented as an external peripheral, may be implemented as an internal peripheral, or any other combination. The display control module converts video data into a serial bit stream. The touch control module detects touch events and the location of the touch events on the touch sensor. Typically the touch location is determined as an x-y coordinate based position.
Touch-screen input/output interface are becoming ever increasing more popular in computing devices such as smart phones, handheld gamming systems, laptop PCs, tablet PCs, netbooks, e-readers and the like. As the use of touch-screen input/output interfaces continues to increase, there is a continuing need for improved display sub-systems, touch sensor sub-systems, and/or touch-screen input/output interface sub-systems.